


Proxima

by papofglencoe, SeeMaree



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Apocalypse, Alternate Universe - Future, Alternate Universe - Space, F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-09-06
Updated: 2016-11-21
Packaged: 2018-08-13 09:01:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,703
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7970881
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/papofglencoe/pseuds/papofglencoe, https://archiveofourown.org/users/SeeMaree/pseuds/SeeMaree
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I paint her as I imagine her, with the gray eyes of a distant star and the sable hair of an endless night. I cloak her in the fire of my sun, and I fall into her beauty, letting her consume me.</p><p>As the light of the sun flits across the canvas, she almost looks real.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Recently an exoplanet that could support life was discovered orbiting our closest neighboring star, Proxima Centauri, a red dwarf that is invisible to the naked eye from Earth. From this exoplanet, Proxima B, its sun would glow at midday the color of a sunset, and our sun would appear as a bright star in the constellation Cassiopeia. Proxima B is several light years away. Even if humans achieved the most advanced form of propulsion within our reasonable grasp, it would still take almost a thousand years to reach Proxima B from Earth.
> 
> Please excuse any scientific errors. My husband is the rocket scientist, not me. With many thanks to the amazing @dandelion-sunset for… everything, the least of which is betaing. And with thanks to the friends who’ve been helping me through the weeds. I love you, guys. Contains direct and revised quotes from The Hunger Games books and films, none of which I own. This was originally posted as a drabble for D12D on tumblr.

At midday the sun burns an orange as delicate as a crane lily and as warm as a glowing ember, as soft and gentle as a lover’s caress stroking my hair, my face, my shoulders, my back. Long beams of light filter through the overhead canopy of leaves, illuminating them, casting the illusion they’ve caught fire as they pirouette on their branches. Transfigured by the alchemy of the daylight, the leaves lie and act like they’re alive like me, rustling and whispering in the wind, chittering like children trying—and failing—to contain their excitement. And, because I’m so desperately lonely, I close my eyes and I let them.

For one precious golden hour, the world around me is radiant and alive and filled with something that feels like the memory of hope. It’s my favorite time of day, when the sunlight is at its strongest, dispelling the shadows that haunt my world. It makes me forget for a short while that I am alone, that it’s been ages since I lost her.

Too soon the light will fade, the dusk of mid-afternoon settling in—that melancholy, dying light that ushers in the seemingly endless night. Under the stars I’ll lie in the tall grass of the meadow and look to the sky, tracing the constellations with one outstretched hand. I’ll find the solitary queen where she sits on her throne and run my hand along her lines—worshipping her, adoring her. One of her stars glows brighter than the rest, a cool, ethereal shade of gray that speaks to me of longing and pain and of secrets shared between sheets, of the agonized moans and locked limbs of lovers entwined in a final, shuddering embrace—dying because they knew, for a time, what it was to live.

Nightfall will come soon enough, so for now I take my brush to the canvas and paint. I paint her as I imagine her, with the gray eyes of a distant star and the sable hair of an endless night. I cloak her in the fire of my sun, and I fall into her beauty, letting her consume me.

As the light of the sun flits across the canvas, she almost looks real.

* * *

 

Through the soot-choked atmosphere I catch a flash of green north of where my country used to be—a forest left standing, maybe, in the Northwest Territories or the Yukon—somewhere inside the Arctic Circle, some place too remote to be worth destroying. I don’t have time to figure it out before another bomb detonates, its fiery red cloud drawing my eyes south to where Los Angeles had been only a second ago.

 _Maybe we deserve to die_.

I hold up three fingers and kiss them—one finger for each one of _them_ —and press my fingers to the tiny square of glass in farewell.

But they’re already gone and, with them, my home. Reduced to rubble, their flesh seared away from their bones.

I close my eyes, blocking out the sight of what’s left of the charred Earth as she grows smaller beneath me, her surface covered with plumes springing up like blooming poppies out of a field of ash. I ache to see swirling shades of green and blue, the ombré of life. But when I look down below, all I see is a mass grave.

Whatever life is left in us, I’m forced to take it with me.

_“Catnip,” he’d said, his long fingers running through my hair, combing it as his eyes glittered down at me in the dark._

_“Yeah?” I wrapped my legs around his waist, pulling him back down to me, cradling him between my thighs because it was the only way I knew to make him feel better, to make him feel anything good at all._

_Even in the dark of our tent, without the aid of electricity or candles or moonlight, I could see through his anger. He reminded me of a lost child, scared and swallowing back his panic, but trying so hard to resemble something brave. As he moved inside me he’d said, “In case I don’t come back, I want you to know—”_

_I kissed him to silence him because there was nothing he had to say I didn’t already know. His kiss tasted like ash and desperation, and when his tongue met mine it felt as cold as a tomb. He knew he was as good as dead, even then._

Now, with the clarity that comes with time and distance, I can see I should have lied and told him what he needed to hear—that I loved him the way he needed me to. It would have been a mercy, something to hold onto in those final moments as the terror washed over him and he soiled himself, falling to the ground as the missiles flew overhead and the bullets sliced through the air, burrowing inside him, one after the other.

Not that it matters, saying the words. I’d told my mother and I’d told— _no_. I can’t afford to think about her. Maybe in a thousand years, but certainly not today.

Anyway, what good does it do—telling a corpse that you love them.

I look at Earth a final time and then tear my eyes away, severing my last connection to it. It is gone, and I’m never coming back. I am forced to consider the fate of my precious cargo, the frozen embryos that are meant, somehow, to preserve the human race, that hold all of our hopes and dreams. I carry the fire of the human race with me, lodged deep in my belly, as I head to the only place left to go on what must be a fool’s errand. It’s either suicide or survival, but who will be left to care either way?

Settling down into my cryochamber, I close my eyes and let the long, dreamless sleep overtake me. My ship catapults through space, and there are no flashes of light, no irradiating plumes. No screams or gunfire. Space is as silent as oblivion, as lonely as any hell.

Sleep comes for me, and my final thought is that they are all dead, and I wish I was dead too.

It would be best.

* * *

 

It is not quite yet morning when I see the meteoroid above me, smudging a careless silver streak across the cloudless amethyst sky. As it falls, instead of burning out and dimming, hissing as it fizzles and dies, it grows brighter and larger. Soon it resembles my favorite star, the pearl the queen wears around her throat.

And then I hear a sonic boom—louder than any thunderstorm, deeper than the pounding tide—and I know this is no ordinary meteoroid.

It is my falling star hurtling toward me. She is a sublime and terrifying thing, the most beautiful thing I have ever beheld.

I hope I live to paint her.

* * *

 

The sun persists in rising, so I make myself stand. Except now it is an unfamiliar sun in an unfamiliar place, a millennium away from everyone and everything I once knew.

I don’t bother to look out the tiny portal to see the world I have landed on. Maybe there is a hellish desert outside the door, a land of crags and jagged peaks, arid and inhospitable. Or maybe it is a jungle overrun with savage beasts and poisonous vegetation, bastard mutt versions of the fauna and flora from— _no_. I can’t call it that. I don’t have one anymore.

With aching, atrophied muscles, I slip on my spacesuit and open the hatch door, taking one, then two, then three precarious steps off my ship. In another time this moment would have been documented and broadcast for posterity.

Now there is no one left to watch.

My eyes grow wide when I see what lies before me—a lush and verdant field, a meadow, really, filled with tall, swaying stalks of grass. A deep, red sun creeps its way over the horizon, staining the sky like blood, the dawn’s light so faint I have to squint to see through the gloom. In the distance there are snow-capped mountains, a range as tall as the Rockies had been, their peaks tinged pink by the sunrise.

I suppose there are worse places to die alone.

No sooner does the thought occur to me than something snaps behind me—a branch, from the treeline at the edge of the meadow.

“H-hello?” My voice cracks from disuse, and I swallow and try to speak again. “Is there—is there someone there? My name is Katniss Everdeen. I come—” I make myself say it, even though it hurts. “I come from Planet Earth.”

I stop to listen, and in the near distance I can hear the call of a bird. It sounds like it’s parroting my words back to me—first my greeting, then my name. At least there will be something here to talk to.

And then I see a man walking toward me. I fall to my knees, unable to support my weight, as he wades through the tall grass, his hair the color of maize. His pale skin glows a ruddy pink in the morning, and his startlingly blue eyes are the color of a lake.

He smiles at me as he approaches, silently greeting me like I am an old friend.

The odds were astronomical. But here, in this place, light years from Earth, I think I may have found a home.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In the end I did nothing. Coward that I was. I spent my last few hours on earth alone. Practice for the rest of my life.
> 
> Could I call her the one who got away when I never had her in the first place?

It cannot be her. I must be falling victim to the mad delusions they warned us about. The type brought on by so many years of solitude. But she looks so real. So much like the girl I remember that I can’t help myself. I go toward her. I don’t care if she’s real or not.

 

She’d never noticed, the way I’d watched her, looking and wanting. Perhaps it was more that she didn’t want to notice.

What was the point, after all? The world was dying around us, tearing itself apart, and we— we were supposed to be the lucky ones. The ones chosen, swept up as the last hope of humankind. Not to save this world. They’d deemed it beyond repair, even if the people killing each other in the street hadn’t gotten the message yet, those shadowy figures of power sounded the death knell, and channeled all their resources into finding an extrasolar home for humanity.

We could survive for a while clinging to Mars and Neptune, but they were no place for humans to grow and thrive.

We’d been chosen as pre-teens. Put through an intensive training regime, and then…

A woman called my name, and I was given my assignment. First lander. Proxima.

I’m not ashamed that I cried. I knew what it meant. Being sent out alone, into deep space, in the hope that the planet I arrived on would be even marginally habitable. And even if it was, waiting for years— decades— alone, before my message reached earth and a trailer ship could be sent.

It was a death sentence, except if I was lucky I’d get to live out my life alone first.

I was only 16.

I was given twenty-four hours to say goodbye to my friends. I had no family left— they were killed in the bombings years ago. It was part of why I was chosen for the program. No one would miss me.

I went to Annie. She was probably my closest friend in the program. She was a few years older than me, and when I’d arrived in the training center as a crying, frightened kid, she’d taken me under her wing, like the big sister I’d never had.

She hugged me, tears streaming down her cheeks.

“I’ve been given my assignment too. First lander,“ she said.

I gasped. No. Not her. I couldn’t imagine her alone. She thrived with others, always caring, always kind, but needing that human interaction. She was so physically affectionate, to imagine her deprived of human contact, it was a terrible thought.

I didn’t know how she’d be able to last decades alone on a distant planet. If her mind would be able to handle the stress.

When her boyfriend arrived in a storm of anger and fear, I left them alone. They didn’t need me around when they only had a few hours left together.

I had thought about going to her. To the girl I’d spent the last two years watching. Perhaps she’d pity me. I grew disgusted with myself for the thought. I knew she had a boyfriend. A trooper. I wondered if he knew that she was going to have to leave him behind to die here, once she received her assignment.

At least she wasn’t called with my group. At least she wasn’t being sent to the opposite end of the galaxy. At least not yet.

In the end I did nothing. Coward that I was. I spent my last few hours on earth alone. Practice for the rest of my life.

Could I call her the one who got away when I never had her in the first place?

Sometimes, when I was younger, when I first entered the program, right after my family died, I would close my eyes to go to sleep and hope that I didn’t ever wake up.

When you enter cryogenic sleep that’s a real possibility. Anything could happen while you slept— space was a dark and dangerous place.

And if I woke from it all I had to look forward to was loneliness.

The cryo sleep was welcome.

Except I did wake up. And, against all expectations, the planet was beautiful.

The skies were orange and pink, not the blue that I remembered being taught about, the blue that the earth used to have before we blotted out the sky with smoke and pain. My new home was a world painted with the tones of warmth.

But it’s the night sky that I learned to love. The stars were so powerful and real. I spent my evenings staring up, tracking out pictures in the pinpoints of light, making up stories about them. And when I looked at the Queen, how could I not think of her? The girl I never had?

I saw to my duties, taking readings and samples that proved, beyond a doubt, that this world was habitable, more than habitable—hospitable.

There was plant life in abundance, forests and grasslands, and animals too, some strange and fierce, while others are almost like something from earth, or what I’d seen in the films anyway. I held out hope for a long time that I would find a higher-level animal, intelligent life of some kind.

But in that I was alone. A bird-like creature that is able to mimic my speech befriended me, but the words were just sounds to it, with no understanding behind them. Still, it was a friend, and I was glad of its companionship to push away some of the loneliness.

I transmitted my readings, hoping that somehow I would be joined by others within my lifetime. That I would not have to live out my entire life alone.

I know I slept for many years, and that it takes equally long for the message to be relayed back, and then a trailer, a ship full of cryogenically frozen settlers would be prepared, and sent, taking as many years again to get to me.

If another suitable world hadn’t been found first, that was.

So many what ifs.

But at least there was hope.

I remembered the stories that I learned as a little boy, when I was still with my family. Stories about the first man, how he was alone in the world, and that he asked God for a companion, and God sent a woman who he fell in love with.

Religion was not something that was encouraged at the training center. But I prayed too. It worked for that other guy, after all. And if the woman I prayed for somehow resembled her, that girl I never had? Who was there to criticize me?

The first winter was hard, the orbit of this planet making it far longer than the turn of seasons on the earth, and I almost ate my way through all the provisions sent with me.

When the weather finally warmed I planted the seeds I brought with me, and I began my experiments on the local flora. My little bird-like friend, who I started calling Jay, was surprisingly helpful. I quickly learned that fruits I saw him eating were generally safe for me too. And he watched out for me. There were large predators that could kill me if they got the chance, but I learned to listen to the warning calls that he and his kind sounded.

And even though I was alone I was not so unhappy, surrounded by such beauty, with so much important work to be done.

I spend my years fruitfully. I planted and harvested and worked on what I decided would be my legacy, a comprehensive study on the edible and medicinal plants of the region. I had no way to explore beyond my immediate area, but was rich in plant life. I began by recording it all in the data banks of the ship, but I didn’t know how long my electronics would last, so I spent the long winters transcribing all the most important data to paper, making a physical book. It was absorbing work, and it brought me joy to think that even if I died before the trailer arrived, this piece of me would still be here waiting, to be passed on to the rest of humankind. My life would be remembered, and valued.

Time went on. Within a few years my food situation was not nearly so precarious, and I turned my attention to building.

The ship was acceptable living quarters, but I wanted a real home. It wasn’t overly ambitious, a small cabin, just two rooms adjacent to the shuttle pod. Two rooms, because I couldn’t let go of the dream that someday I would share it with another person.

I began to study some of the grazing animals, with an eye toward domestication. Perhaps next summer.

The ebbing of the warmer seasons, and the build up to winter produced a melancholy in me. I had much less to do in winter, so much more time to think.

I stare up at the stars, at the Queen, knowing that the pearl at her throat is the sun of my own home system.

“Please,” I beg. “Please. Don’t leave me here alone.”

Maybe some god heard me. Because the next day a light streaks across the sky. I have a moment of terror, realizing that I set the beacon far to close to my cabin. But the shuttle lands in the field of grain, about half a mile from my home. 

Jay picks up on my excitement, flying ahead of me to investigate. And I hear him echoing back a name. An impossible name.

It cannot be her. I must be falling victim to the mad delusions that we were warned us about. The type brought on by so many years of solitude. But she looks so real. So much like the girl I remember, that I can’t help myself. I go toward her. I don’t care if she’s real or not.

If she’s not real, if it’s all a dream, then I will live in it as long as I can.

I smile as I walk toward her, just like I do in my fantasies. “You can take your suit off. The air is breathable.” I say, cool and suave.

Slowly her hands come up, and undo the fasteners at the neck, and she removes the helmet, letting me see her beautiful face clearly at last. She’s older, not the girl I remember, but a woman of maybe thirty. I suppose I’ve grown older too.

“How did you get here so fast?” It should be several more decades, at least.

“They couldn’t wait for a response. We—ran out of time.”

Such a mundane way to deliver the news. The earth is dead. How was your day?

I look behind her. No one else seems to be emerging from the ship. “Where is everyone else?”

She shakes her head. “They split us up. One ship to each of the most promising worlds. This one was almost an after thought. they didn't think your odds were very good. So all you get is me. Me, and well…” She hits the button that opens the larger doors of the ship. The interior is lined with what looks like banks of shiny white drawers.

“Me and them. 500 babies. I hope you’re excited about being a father.”

I shake my head a little. This is feeling… too much feeling. And it’s not going the way my fantasies usually do. I don't think this is a delusion.

“Katniss Everdeen just landed on my planet, and told me I’m going to spend the rest of my life surrounded by children?” Small people who need love and crave endless affection? Who will fill this planet with life and laughter? “This is real?”

And then her eyes widen. “It is you! I remember you, from the training center. Peeta.” And she pulls off her glove, and touches her hand to my face. “The beard threw me off.”

The feel of another human being’s touch sends me over the edge. And I burst into messy tears. And she hugs me, sobbing against my shoulder, pulling me close, as if she needs to feel touch again too.

We stay locked together like that for a long time.

“It was as if the whole world was burning,” she says. “What right did I have to live? To get to come here?” 

I look at the banks of drawers behind her, each one containing a precious child. “Because they needed you. Come with me. Come and see what I have built for us,” I say, and she takes my hand and follows me.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is by me (SeeMaree). Papofglencoe generously allowed me to hop into her world and answer my own question, about how Peeta came to be on that planet, all alone, dreaming of a woman from the stars. Hopefully my fic of a fic is a satisfactory answer to that!


End file.
